What Women Choose When They Can’t Have Everything
CChris Williamson
MarriageParentingExerciseBeautyAccessories
Transcript
00:00:00what about that um mate budget study that normally did because that was about trade-offs right and
00:00:05typically some people generally have good things that come along with good things but for the most
00:00:11part there are there are some sorts of trade-offs with someone's spent an awful lot of time dedicated
00:00:16on one thing they've maybe neglected another part of another area it's an interesting study there
00:00:20right so basically can you explain for the normies sure um so normally
00:00:26so yeah norm lee normally he uh did a did a study where he gave people a budget of made dollars and
00:00:33then asked them create create the ideal mate that you can with this budget some people got a big
00:00:38budget and where that was the case men and women they both um wanted everything they um they wanted
00:00:43good looks they wanted uh they wanted like a good job high status blah blah blah the works um but if
00:00:51they had a smaller mate budget which i think is probably more like most people's situation in life
00:00:56no offense um if they had that they um sex differences became more pronounced and so people
00:01:04men would spend more to get an attractive partner uh whereas women would spend more to get a um a
00:01:12partner with resources and status yeah yeah he also did a study where he had people allocate for
00:01:19themselves if i'm not mistaken and it mirrored the uh it mirrored that that same pattern where it's like
00:01:26when men were kind of rpg style building their own character i think it was sam i don't mean to give
00:01:30him credit if it wasn't but um basically men tried to make themselves richer relative to women and
00:01:37women tried to make themselves prettier relative to men so that's the reason why we don't see women
00:01:41turning up in supercars with expensive rolexes at a nightclub or guys spending tons of time doing the
00:01:47beautification thing but we know we have an intuition about what is effective yeah it's the the failures just
00:01:54continue to stack up in really interesting ways well this is something that we proposed actually in our
00:01:58pnas paper uh in the discussion section we talked about this where it's like it is interesting and
00:02:03quite conspicuous but also quite circumstantial that over the 1900s there's pretty good data from david
00:02:09buss it's hard to do it's hard to gather this survey data but it does seem that over time throughout
00:02:15the 1900s um especially in the period after women's kind of financial emancipation let's call it uh
00:02:22mate preferences converged quite a bit between men and women and then also we're now seeing this
00:02:27tremendous behavioral convergence where it's like women aren't doing sports cars and flashy watches but
00:02:33they do have pretty nice handbags pretty nice shoes and they are pretty ritzy in terms of their finances
00:02:38but that's only signaling to women and that well maybe and then uh but men are definitely even if
00:02:43you say for the women's side that's not true on the men's side we see that men have tripled their
00:02:47parenting effort since the 1970s um and male beautification i know that it's really trendy right now with
00:02:54the whole looks maxing thing uh but this is actually just the newest instantiation of a documented trend
00:02:59going back to the 1990s you can read the historian lynn luciano's work on this uh where male beautification
00:03:05has increased decade on decade to a point where basically everyone even like a normal man who
00:03:10doesn't consider himself like a beautifying person uh his behavior his daily routine would be
00:03:16unrecognizable to his grandfather like the average you had to shave your head you don't need to think
00:03:20about we did uh we did a little data analysis um on using health data essentially seeing like how much
00:03:28has weightlifting actually increased and generation on generation it's like you go from basically like
00:03:34not a behavior to every young man is now like every every man like every other member of gen z
00:03:40essentially is like a recreational bodybuilder that's right i totally do find that attractive though right
00:03:46um they do find uh some some muscularity uh attractive and uh good grooming attractive they
00:03:52find parenting attractive but i'm not persuaded at all in fact i don't think it's the case that men think
00:03:56that um she's really hot i love that handbag i don't think i don't think so either maybe that was
00:04:01a bit cheeky but i do think that it is i do think it's conspicuous um and so it's worth pointing
00:04:05out where it's like i don't think that women are necessarily signaling their resources to attract men
00:04:11but it's interesting that they're signaling resources more over the same time period and in the male
00:04:16beautification i would really put my foot down and say no that that is to attract women and i think it
00:04:21is because they have their own money right okay so you're this is your pet theory right that because
00:04:26the socioeconomic imbalance between men and women has been reduced or even reversed men need to find a
00:04:33different way they need to compete on another domain of attractiveness and that has been self-beautification
00:04:39i'm going to make myself look nicer now beauty is the beauty is the flashy one uh parenting is the quiet
00:04:45one that's actually better evidenced where it's like man used to yeah exactly where it's like and we see
00:04:50this even in um in lee's 2015 study um where it does seem that when women have their own money
00:04:58they recognize where it's like well i have the financial thing kind of sorted i really need like
00:05:02a helper at the nest a little bit more and that's been the preference shift and men have definitely
00:05:08responded to that i mean men have tripled their a man today spends more time with children i believe i
00:05:13think i heard this from you that it was then than women did in the 1950s there's a dramatic difference
00:05:17though at least in the u.s context i've read that this differs by socioeconomic status and education
00:05:22where educated upper middle class men are spending far more time with their children than fathers in the
00:05:29past whereas yeah non-college men um are spending the same amount as uh decades past or even slightly
00:05:35less and the average is getting brought up yeah primarily by college educated men although those
00:05:40those women don't necessarily have as much money yeah yeah but then the men are also spending less
00:05:46yeah it's part of it though just that people are um guys are thinking it's only fair you know they're
00:05:51responding to arguments that have been made by by feminists and others just that guys haven't been
00:05:57pulling their weight in the past and they think that they should to a degree can i on this handbag
00:06:01point i think i heard this from tanya reynolds that um she suggested that that it's not it's not that uh
00:06:08men obviously aren't attracted to you know these luxurious handbags and uh in some cases women uh
00:06:14you know they're they're buying these handbags or wearing them to impress women i know what you're
00:06:17going to say but it's about deterring deterring look at how much my husband is in the hole for this
00:06:23stupid bag that he doesn't understand what it is none of his friends understand what it is i'm not even
00:06:29doing it for other guys yeah it's not my boobs right which would be the sort of thing that wouldn't be
00:06:34a deterrent it would actually probably be the cause of ire from other women whereas
00:06:41women would compliment handbags more than they would compliment boobs yes yeah yeah hundred percent
00:06:46i mean i imagine that we're in an environment of uh you know increasing mate competition if you were
00:06:51and if you're a big engagement ring why the massive engagement then look at how much he's in the hole
00:06:55yeah so ultimately stay clear but what's the benefit though of intimidating other women and
00:07:00saying look at this great handbag to keep them away from the the partner why if guys don't care
00:07:05about it why would other women think well i better stay away because i don't have as nice a handbag well
00:07:10if he's so invested in her that he spent 20 grand on a handbag then it's probably not worth my time to
00:07:15poach him or to attempt to poach him i see so it could be a mate it could be mate poaching deterrence it
00:07:20could also be just kind of classic high status to low status threat behavior yeah um i remember
00:07:24literally first day of my phd arrived in melbourne um and went for a walk with candace and i asked her
00:07:30this exact question i was just like why do you think women love the handbags because i knew that she was
00:07:34really into beautification stuff and that she really had her head around those things and just immediately
00:07:38said to scare young women just immediately yeah yeah yeah and so i was like okay interesting and i do think
00:07:44that it is um i i feel like i've i've since then maybe tried to observe it as like a second order
00:07:50thing and i think it's kind of maybe the male equivalent of like a guy who's really jacked
00:07:54walking into the room when a woman walks in and she's very glamorous she's got the expensive shoes
00:07:59the expensive bags throws it on the table it's like it's like i like i could i run this
00:08:03shit like it's kind of like that atmosphere there's also a sense at least with guys guys that have
00:08:07got a ton of muscle on them you have to have spare time you have to have spare time you have to have
00:08:13spare money to be able to afford the food and the peds you need to be at least somewhat disciplined
00:08:19you need to have the time to be able to plan your training sessions and you know not be at work every
00:08:24single hour of the day in the same way as the long nails that a woman might have and the well-done
00:08:28hair and the good beauty regime is costly in terms of time and that indicates an awful lot more
00:08:33about lifestyle than just resources to but i totally didn't think about the fact that guys going to the
00:08:37gym is a form of male beautification if you class that in which i just like totally did not consider
00:08:44if you add in guys going to the gym as a form of male beautification it's got to be 4x 5x 6x 10x
00:08:52what it would have been 100 years ago for male beautification yeah i mean that's what the best uh
00:08:55that's what the best study on beautification did it's it's martica wall study um it's and she found
00:09:00that in all except for seven countries women beautified more uh there were there were seven
00:09:04that men beautified more um slightly um and this was the weightlifting side of it essentially was
00:09:13what was that was the behavior where men were uh the big pac-man chunk that's been taken out of the
00:09:18side yeah it is and uh and some might say oh well a lot of men beautify a lot of men hit the gym
00:09:24sorry for health not beautification and some of them do it for status competitions they actually but they
00:09:29thought of that they had a question in there that it's like okay doing it for beauty though basically
00:09:35how much time are you like bodybuilding and so they they they really were able to drill down on that
00:09:40and there was one other behavior this is so counterintuitive where among the people who did it
00:09:47men actually did this behavior more so think about different beautification behaviors i won't bore you by
00:09:53making you guess but it was makeup um among people who wear makeup the men who wear makeup spend way more
00:10:00time on it than the women um just because they're less good at it they've been growing up on youtube
00:10:05tutorial yeah i think that it's um what she said to me was that she thinks that it's um essentially men
00:10:11who wear makeup have some kind of special qualitative difference maybe it's that they're like a sense i
00:10:16told her look you're picking up on like male beauty influencers essentially like like who is and so
00:10:20they just have different yeah yeah but i thought that was interesting is that the um is that in terms
00:10:25of numbers among the james charles on repeat yeah it's just james charles clocking in 16 hours a day
00:10:30yeah and causing the difference but it was it was interesting so it was basically yeah there was this uh
00:10:34that was the second biggest difference technically was the weightlifting the biggest was the makeup um
00:10:39but it was because of that effect tell me if this sounds familiar you train regularly you eat
00:10:43reasonably well you feel fine but you're just kind of going off vibes most people have absolutely no
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00:11:39thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that clip you will love the full-length episode in
00:11:43all of its glory right here come on press it
00:11:49Thank you.
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